A Man For All Seasons

DR. RICHARD KARL is not under 30. He's not under 30 x 2, either. He's 70. But at 67 he fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming--wait for it--a professional jet pilot. Last year he was promoted to captain. His employer is JetSuite, a private-jet charter company based in California.

Aren't pilots supposed to be retiring, not starting out, at that age? True enough. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration forces commercial airline pilots to retire at 65. At that age, Dr. Karl was winding up another, quite different career--that of a cancer surgeon and the chairman of the department of surgery at the University of South Florida College of Medicine. Dr. Karl specialized in the toughest kinds of cancers: esophageal, stomach, pancreatic and liver. He wrote a book in 2002 about his medical career, Across the Red Line: Stories from the Surgical Life. Dr. Karl also writes a column for Flying magazine.

Why would someone trade a universally respected--and richly compensated--career as a cancer surgeon and a medical school department chair for a job that pays little and is populated by hungry younger people trying to work their way up into the airlines? Is he nuts? Or, possibly, is Dr. Karl's odd career switch evidence that we can grow and blossom at any age?

"I thought that I'd enjoyed a 40-plus-year career in surgery about as much as anybody I knew," he e-mailed me. "I liked the technical: what operation to perform, how to strategize the flow of the case, the minute details of the cutting and sewing. I loved the visceral: This was a very earthy business, what with your hands inside another human being. I loved the camaraderie: Not many get to experience the responsibility, the triumphs and the defeats in the same way. Being a cancer surgeon seemed to magnify all of this even more. It was a hard thing to describe to others."

And flying? "When I walked away from the operating table close to two years ago, I raced toward a new career--flying professionally. An amateur pilot of small propeller planes for almost 50 years, I'd been a heartsick professional-pilot wannabe for most of that time. I knew that my window of opportunity to fly a jet for hire was going to close if I didn't bust a move."

What caused Dr. Karl to "bust" his move into professional jet flying was a cancer of his own. At 67 he was diagnosed with stage 3 prostate cancer. It was successfully treated, but the brush with mortality reminded Dr. Karl that he was running out of runway. "It was now or never if I wanted to fly jets."

Dr. Karl almost died in his 30s, when he was a young attending surgeon and a needle stick gave him hepatitis. That mortal brush caused a career rethink. "I had a prestigious career path in front of me at the University of Chicago. But after the hepatitis, I wanted something bolder." Dr. Karl headed to the University of South Florida to help build the medical school and the Moffitt Cancer Center, where he served as founding medical director. "It was the entrepreneurial thing, not the prestigious thing. It was a chance to build something and make our own prestige, not live off of the prestige of others."

"IT'S ALL A GIFT"

Last month I visited Dr. Karl and his wife, Cathy, at their waterfront home in Tampa's Beach Park neighborhood. The next day we flew to the couple's other home in Hanover, N.H. in Dr. Karl's personal airplane--a vintage 1980 twin-engine Piper Cheyenne.

I asked Dr. Karl why, with two beautiful homes and his own airplane, he would suffer the deprivations of being a charter pilot: low pay, budget airport hotels, dried-out scrambled eggs, sour coffee, and waiting for hedge fund managers and movie stars to board the jet. "It's all a gift. I'm flying a Cessna Citation CJ3. I'm flying to places I would never have gone in my own plane."

The flying doctor already knows how to bust his next move. He wants to make medical practice safer. "Did you know that well over 100,000 people die in the U.S. each year from medical errors? That's a scandal." Dr. Karl says commercial aviation's stellar safety record shows the way. "Checklists, decision management, simulator training. The airlines do this much better than hospitals." Fear of reputational damage makes hospitals loath to admit errors, he says. "Learning opportunities are lost."

Are you too old to make the FORBES 30 Under 30 list? Then you might find inspiration in Dr. Dick Karl, who's made his own time line in his own way. If, like Dr. Karl, you have curiosity and courage, who cares how old you are?